TAPS/Music
I use performance as a lens to explore questions of cultural authenticity, racialization, and intercultural communication. I am a lifelong practitioner of Carnatic music and specialize as an accompanist for bharatanatyam, so that in my work as a performer I am deeply attuned to intra-ensemble dynamics and to the relationships between gesture and sound. Meanwhile, in my work as a scholar I am interested in performances that transgress boundaries of some kind, including borders around race, language, and genre. My dissertation project, "Sounding the Hyphen: Cross-Cultural Performance in South Asian America," explores the affordances of these transgressions for diasporic practitioners of South Asian music, whose artistic performance practices emerge as critical sites of identity formation and interracial dialogue. My work has been published in the Routledge edited volume Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom: Crossover, Exchange, Appropriation.